


the kitchen god

by superkawaiifreak



Category: Kingdom Hearts (Video Games)
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe, M/M, restaurant
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-11
Updated: 2020-08-13
Packaged: 2021-03-06 05:13:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,460
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25837849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/superkawaiifreak/pseuds/superkawaiifreak
Summary: One's a cook and one's an Ivy League brat. Neither of them think it will work out. Akuroku Month. Axel/Roxas, AU.
Relationships: Akuroku, Axel/Roxas
Comments: 1
Kudos: 7
Collections: Akuroku Week 2020





	1. part one

**Author's Note:**

> This is a three-part short story. Will upload parts two and three soon. This story is based off a lovely Michael Pollan quote:  
> “For is there any practice less selfish, any labor less alienated, any time less wasted, than preparing something delicious and nourishing for people you love?”
> 
> CW: mentions of sex work, drugs, general dipshittery.

_ The kitchen god, part i _

* * *

Another night that Axel found himself bursting out of bathroom stalls, his lips chapped and red, his last pair of good shoes finally tore. Be weary of men with unruly beards and ripped fingernails. It’ll feel like a sawtooth once inside, she used to insist. Stay away from the genteel type, you know the ones: face prettier than a porcelain doll, pressed slacks, powder-blue ties. Lips unused to kissing and cocks rubbery from disuse, untrained and too excited to please. They’ll rip your throat out. And the ones who looked like priests — once their body leaves your body, the memory will stay with you, a ghost who still stand at the edge of your bed. 

Axel found the happy medium, the sweet spot on the street. It was the academic. The repressed professor whose red-haired wife had traveled to Spain for the month needed something other than papers quivering in his hands. He or she who paid a large sum, at least in the microcosm of dusty shelves and graduate seminars, for sex with Axel did it in secret. Obviously. Perhaps that was part of the charm inherent to the stuffy academic spaces he so often frequented. Perhaps it was the outrageous rates those with tenure would gleefully oblige to for a night spent with him. For additional fees — not by the hour, of course, but by the service performed — he would become an actor. A Victorian-esque gentleman married to the mores of a reticent and repressed society. He’d be a charismatic boyfriend. An elegant raconteur. Caress a hand beneath the dinner table, shaved and fresh-smelling with some watered-down lavender.

The best work was in the city, of course. Full of misfits, neophytes, certifiably crazed psychopaths and socialites so rich it was stupid, sick and green with hubris, New York treated him well. New York fanned his efforts and exploits. Need a quick thousand to pay for rent? Hang out by the Wilmer law offices for a couple hours on a Friday night — repressed queers, desperate to keep their status as  _ heterosexual and happily-married  _ a tight rictum, impenetrable — will fall into your lap, begging you to slide your fingers up their ass. Heaven knows their wives’ feminine legs, their knobby breasts, just aren’t doing the trick anymore. He can’t even count, or doesn’t care to count, how many times he’s been asked to come on men’s faces. It was always a miraculous event, he thought, seeing the utter explosion of joy in their eyes, when his dick would quiver and droop before their faces. 

He was, of course, suicidal. To mar the body, day in and day out, by work only made capable by beauty, wore him out. Sure, he’d see the lights of a lecture hall. He’d seriously use a pen for the rest of his life. Those days of high school were over. In Axel’s case, though, he can’t quite say when the life-ruining began. There was a time in high school when, his neurological chemicals pounding him into hell, even then, he flung four desks inside of a classroom because his teacher failed to call on him to answer a question. And why, Axel, won’t you stop this insanity, don’t you know that you can be expelled? La-la-la, he’d sing, smacking the walls with his palms, kicking backpacks. La-la-la, I can’t hear you. Then there was the other time, he barely graduated high school with a 2.0, and landed what he thought to be a swanky job as line cook at a cool Portuguese joint on the Upper East Side. He was within walking distance to his heroin dealer, and within a few weeks, was getting regular blowjobs from one of the brown-eyed prep cook drones. 

They broke up, obviously. It fell into his lap, he claimed; he said some old guy approached him at a bar after a particularly harrowing Thursday shift, asked Axel if he wanted to meet him in the bathroom. Disgusted initially, Axel turned away from the man, practically scoffing. But then the man leaned in and whispered, “how about for five hundred?” In seven minutes, Axel’s entire face was smashed against the single-use stall, his vision blurry, body unused to the pendulus swing of ball sack between his legs. He was sure that his ass had been torn open, probably bleeding and shit everywhere, smearing between asscheeks and the man’s fingers who, greedily, pinched and spit and slapped roughly, in between calling Axel a slut. The man counted out five hundred in front of Axel in a low voice, going up in twenties, as if some prostituting ritual. Axel scooped up the bills ten minutes after the man left the bathroom, shaken and ass feeling like a metal rod had been stuck up his rectum, and texted his sort-of-girlfriend:  _ we’re over.  _

He preferred New York above all else because everywhere else sucked. Baltimore possessed a type of low-brow desire for cultured otherness, which Axel saw as an extension of the Southern farmboy who wanted to go to the big city to “make it,” only to run back to his papa’s farm, tail between his legs, because he was too weak to make it alone. In those lesser cities, with the marmalade-sweet Ozark rockies and the pathetic little strip malls laid out like papier-mache across slabs of hot concrete and soft asphalt, social mores give way to the atrophying of taste. Grown adults still prefer boxed macaroni to hand-pulled lo men — not because they choose this life hardly worth living — but because they do not know what lo mein  _ is.  _ No one does in the Appalachia country. Axel wasn’t a little bitch like they were in the Baltimore or Chicago or Los Angeles or Houston, and secondly, anything south of New York was not worth a second thought. God forbid he actually try to do business in any of the aforementioned pig towns. He’d probably make the first Man’s Man he saw melt with one lingering stare, would feel up a pathetic boner, barely lap at the head of a penis, and be forced to swallow semen composed of triglycerides and high fructose corn syrup. All of this needless suffering for a fraction of the profit — no thank you. See, Axel didn’t favor escort services or sex work or prostitution or  _ whatever _ for the fuck of it; he did it because New York was an unbelievable market with rich men and insecurities so powerful they’d destroy a nation for it. And, as it turned out, they’d pay him a fortune to keep their secret. 

“You ever gunna work here full-time, man?” Riku asked, the other line cook. He was the fish guy, used to chopping gills and pulling the bloody guts out of things. He was no man for beating around the bush. 

“Thinkin’ about it,” Axel said. He sponged his forehead with a rag, the heat of the stove licking at his face. “Why?”

Riku shrugged. “Dunno. Just like you the most is all,” he continued working on the mackerel, pinching its mouth between his fingers. “New guy is weird.”

“Oh,” he shrugged, and Riku could tell that Axel couldn’t give any less of a fuck about it. Kitchen gossip. Who’s fucking who, what’s the chef doing, where is the fish order — Axel only cared about closing and how fast he could do a line while on all fours.

“Something up with him?”

Riku grunted in confusion, mid-cut. “... What?”

“New guy. You said he’s weird,” Axel scouted his cabinet for his favorite wooden spoon, kneeling and using a small flashlight. “So is he?”

“A bit. Doesn’t talk much and looks kinda like a — a girl.”

Axel giggled and changed the heat to HIGH. “A girl, huh. Must be gay.”

“You callin’ him gay like it’s bad?”

“Obviously not. How many times have I gone on my knees for you, fish boy?”

And that was the usual flux of conversation between them. Their conversations were peppered with bits of realness and bits of fakeness and sometimes things in between, like how maybe they actually want to fuck each other after shift. Axel, reigning king of the queer scene, was almost certain that he could straight-bait Riku any day, at least when he wasn’t getting any. 

There were other moments in the kitchen, the rest of the world forgotten between the two of them, that totally and completely eclipsed all other experiences in either one’s lives. Riku was an attractive guy, an Ivy League graduate and a bit of a prick, and it made him interesting, to say the least. His taste was best met by plates prepared scrupulously, with his demi-glaces preplanned and prepared down to the gram. Often, he wouldn’t even eat mussels unless he physically  _ saw  _ the chef’s mise-en-place. He met Axel without pretense and failed to judge others’ places in life. He liked Axel for his dedication to the craft — Axel, whorish mercenary in the kitchen, could stack impossibly-high towers of forcemeat stuffings, casseroles, even veal; he’d pour boiling stews filled with squid and fish cakes into baked dough shells for the fuck of it. (“ _ It’s art, man! Get with the fucking program! _ ”). And Riku admired it. 

It followed naturally that they built a strong bond between the drone-like work of dishing out four hundred dinners a night, both silently loathing their new broiler man who couldn’t hold a hot saucepan to save his life. Axel would mouth to Riku,  _ “cabron,” _ in times like these, and Riku would toss whatever bit of pasta at Axel. He always made a display of it, Axel, catching whatever bits of deformed gnocchi in his mouth while emitting a loud moan of Riku’s name. Other times, Axel would fry bits of day-old pastry dough and shape it into a ball, pad it with the pastry chef’s cocoa powder, and pretend to shit right on the floor. This usually worked best with newcomers doing their stage shift; he and Riku out-bullied and out-snobbed all virgin cooks, whether they were seasoned or not. The kitchen was Riku’s and Axel’s, and everyone needed to fucking know that. 

“Eighty-six swordfish!” Riku screamed at the top of his lungs to Olette, the most senior server. She was a real whirlwind, a ball of energy and could always bail the kitchen out of mistakes by sweet-talking incensed customers with her red-lipsticked lips. But she let it go to her head. “God fucking dammit, woman! How many times do you need to be told!?” Riku slapped her ticket to the cutting board and sliced it into four neat pieces, his fingers trembling with rage. “See? No more! Eighty-fucking-six  _ swordfish!”  _

Olette rolled her eyes at him, coolly brushing him off. She was the only one who would dare. “Then do the special.”

“No ticket, no food!” Axel yelled. A look of mischief spread across his face.

“Go fuck yourself,” she responded. The special was out in under eight minutes, Riku cussing up a storm and sponging his face with rag after rag, muttering about the god damn incompetent servers. He put some English in it, spun the oval plate right into Olette’s hands. She later thanked him, her lips sliding in and around his mouth, saliva gathering at their chins. Axel listened hungrily, his ear pressed up to utility closet’s door. He slipped his hand down his sweated-through work pants in a spiritual state, wondering when on earth he would give and receive that type of pleasure. Axel, bone broth enthusiast and top-tier escort, hadn’t had time for a boyfriend in three years.

* * *

In this case, the ghost wasn’t anything that even slightly resembled hope for a ‘normal life.’ He had given it up, the ghost. In fact, he had given up any and all forms of ghostliness: no holy ghost, no inner demons, no crude excuse of a conscience. A godless person, floating from kitchen to kitchen, scraping cum from his shoes and plain t-shirts, Axel worked weekends either slamming out dinners or fucking men with the thinnest condoms he could find. 

But today was Tuesday, and the chef hadn’t take off their usual Monday, and it was raining bloody-fucking-murder, and for whatever fucking reason, tourists yet  _ insisted  _ on meandering into their dining room, slick with thick rain droplets and cheap ponchos. The air had swelled with an incredible warmth, and both Axel’s and Riku’s armpits were pungent. Perfumed and strong with sour and stale body odor. 

“Fuck this,” Axel gritted his teeth. Sweat poured down his face and clouded his vision. Chef had just yelled at him for the third time this shift, and it was only half past five. Riku didn’t bother to look up from his saucepan until he heard Axel’s shoes squeak.

“Not fucking today. I can’t deal with this today.” He threw his rag to the floor and marched toward Chef, who was wedged between the sanitizing sinks and broom closet.

“No no no no — I said to do this  _ yesterday _ , motherfucker, not today!” Chef had murder in his eyes as he yelled at the dishwasher, a faint blush on his cheeks. He saw Axel making his way toward the exit and exploded. “Where the  _ fuck  _ do you think you’re going, Mister-fucking-Hartt?!”

Axel halted. Then he had a look appear in his eye. “Where do I think I’m going? How about to last fucking Monday, where you were supposed to have taken your day off but refused to do so? How about before the shift, before you thought you could fuck me in the ass in front of everyone here?” He sucked in air through his nostrils, feeling brave, knowing that he was indispensable to Chef. “I work my fucking ass off for you, homie, every hour you want, and I keep my fucking mouth shut, and you still treat me like I’m some fucking new guy?” He rolled his eyes, his mouth frothing, “I don’t think so, Chef!”

Chef opened his mouth to shout, and Axel was ready for it — prepared to hear the worst of it, how his mother was a whore and his father a woman-beater, how he was a dick-sucking slut with nothing else besides the restaurant — but Chef slowly closed it. Crimini mushrooms flew through the air and demi-glaces evaporated, reducing each second, and the entirety of the animated kitchen froze. 

“Be back tomorrow.” He nodded at Axel. Then, a desperate attempt: “Axel—” he grabbed the redhead’s elbow. “I’m not — I’m not losing you, am I?”

Axel shook his head. “No, Chef.” 

No, Chef — No, Chef. He needed the money. He needed it more than he could even imagine. Between the rent and the girls and the boys and cocaine skyrocketing to two-hundred a gram, Axel would sooner throw himself from the Empire State Building than lose his gig with Chef Strife and Riku, Ivy-League prick whose pornographic lips pushed Axel over the edge. 

(He had no idea who he was. Even now, as he looks back, in between twirling his boyfriend’s blonde hair and threading his fingers through that lovely bundle of strands, he cannot recall the emotional justification of that time in his life. Rationally, he sought out and executed what was required of him: money to make ends meet. Lines of coke from the tiles of the just-sanitized kitchen floor, crouching on all fours, slurping up that powdery glory — was  _ that  _ necessary? While these memories tug at him, they too elicit (forcibly) some of his most vulnerable images of childhood — balmy nights in citrusy California, bright watermelons eaten poolside, Mario Party in his cousin’s dappled sunlit room — and he’s rendered speechless. He’s convinced that the decadent days must have existed to accommodate his spirit as it is now, the ultimate juxtaposition. His boyfriend rises up from their couch.

“I ate the plums earlier,” his boyfriend confesses shyly. “They were just so sweet... I can use nectarines instead for the burgers.” His hands linger in Axel’s for another moment, and Axel melts into his touch.) 

He hadn’t had a Tuesday off in months. The rain prevented him from venturing to the tourists traps, though ruefully inundated by hot out-of-towners, that were the gardens of the park. Go figure. Slumping his way to the nearest bus stop, he saw New York: lone poles, uneven sidewalks, discarded plastics — all covered in shit. He sneered and jangled the keys in his pocket. But then he smelled it.  _ Chow mein. _

The plate steamed into his face like something perverse; the black bean sauce-covered noodles glistened, showing off for his famished gaze. With mild abandon, he twirled mouthful after mouthful of the thick, stringy goodness into his mouth; his feet ached in a deep, spinal pain; truffle salt pasted itself onto his neck from his earlier encounter with Chef; he soaked in the onslaught of pleasure brought on by the chow mein, its carbohydrates gratuitously activating his insulin something erratic. 

Carrying a to-go container of yet another order of the same dish, he stood outside of the restaurant, dodging the rain to little avail. And, as it happens, he spotted some Clueless-Looking Guy chatting away into his phone, narrowly avoiding collision with vehicles. Axel looked more closely. Blonde kid. Shortish. An assured gaze, so not a tourist. A bit squirrely, though, as if the place were new to him. Axel sneered. Some college student. Either an NYU bum fuck, a CUNY underachiever, or a Columbia pissbaby.

Suddenly a car came to a screeching halt. It paused for a moment, enough for the blonde kid to squeal and leap away from the vehicle, then physically recoil as the car let out a ten-second horn blare.

"Hey, what the _fuck?!"_

Axel paled. That kid could shout.

"Yo, stay the fuck away from me!" he shouted again, kicking the headlight of the car. Uh-oh

A huge guy with long gray hair stepped out. His expression was black. "Kick my car again and I'll kick your ass."

"Touch me and you're dead. Seriously," he taunted, "my family fuckin' runs this city. You touch me and your whole family will go down."

The gray-haired man paused as if thinking it over. His gaze traveled between the expensive wristwatch, the Italian leather, Roxas's diamond earrings.

"I could be lying, sure. But do you really wanna bet? Ever hear of the Tripps?"

Axel, totally transfixed by the interaction, bit back a smile. For a kid so tiny, he had the guts.

"Yeah that's right, bitch," the kid said as he spat next to the offending car. "Drive away." He lingered on the disappearing vehicle. "And you," he turned his menacing gaze to Axel, "what are you lookin' at?"

"What's your name?"

"What's it to you?"

"I just want to know your name. Something Tripp."

"Roxas."

"Ah. Roxas," Axel murmured it to himself, feeling it in his tongue, "nice name. Say, Roxas, you hungry?" He held up his styrofoam box. "Xian's fine foods. Black bean chow mein."

"I don't eat that shit. But if you're asking me out, my answer is yes."


	2. part two

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The adventures of Axel, the line cook at a swanky restaurant in the Upper East Side, continue.

_ the kitchen god, part ii _

* * *

Axel’s hands hurt.

So did his knees and his toes. Radiating pain shot up his joints, settled in his lower back, his sacrum. He could crack every vertebrae in his spine, he’d brag _.  _ He didn’t dare try cracking his wrist though - that would be the beginning of the end, and they all knew it. It had been a particularly hazy Saturday night - he doesn’t remember much of what occurred at the bistro, or, excuse me,  _ Les Notes,  _ save for the faint image of a reduction exploding in his face and Riku shanking the new guy the second after Olette locked the front doors. It had been ages since he’d seen him that angry - and rightly so, with this motherfucker who spilled not one but  _ three  _ specials on Axel. Riku’s secondhand rage had been a sight to behold. 

It’s Sunday morning at ten o’clock and he’s lying in bed, recounting the bone-crushing weekend he had had at the restaurant _.  _ It’s his first day off this week. He’s dreamily conjuring images of his bathroom - that sweet, sweet bathroom - and he wants to invent a urethra-extending rubber tube with a type of vacuum suction to keep piss from waterfalling back dow so he can piss while in bed. He wants it to go all the way from his bed to the bathroom, and to trickle off neatly in his abused toilet bowl. Have some self-cleaning mechanism. He’s not sure if he’ll ever be able to move again.  _ (“You fucking come in here and shit all over our hard work?” Riku heaves his chest into the terrified server whose belly rubs into Riku’s sweat-soaked shirt. “You will not be hired here, and you want to know why? Because I will not fucking work with you! Get the hell out of my kitchen!”) _

Axel’s hand is too close to his dick as he’s thinking about Riku fuming like that. 

He tended to get melancholy on Sunday mornings. Melancholy and perhaps even philosophical, if he dared to privilege himself such a term reserved for degree-holding academics who wore pointy glasses and drank sherry. He’d think about nebulous things like  _ the point _ and inferiority and conclude that his and Riku’s decision to fool around with Olette - at the same time - was made under totally sober, clear-headed thinking. That it wasn’t predatory, manipulative, driven solely by lust. Or worse yet, inspired by proximal intimacy. Because he’s not actually gay; he just makes really, really good money from sucking cock. The ball-fondling, the moaning, stroking of the hair? That’s decorum - a sprig of parsley. He’s a fucking cook, for god’s sake, and he likes pussy. Likes it all over him.

He shifts in his bed, rolls over and rifles through his nightstand for a cigarette. It lights easily and the world flattens out with one exhalation.

It was practically naked, how much he wanted her. And Riku. At the same time. Declarations of non-specific goodwill simply  _ lingered  _ in the air from his mouth; he’d wish them both good evenings, would text them _ good morning _ s on their days off. His sideways glances clung to Olette like ivy; the way his eyes would pause on Riku’s lips was not unnoticed. There was a sustained, floating glance; mushrooms flew everywhere. Axel’s and Riku’s skin glistened with sweat as they bore down on their sweltering dishes, and Riku peeked up at precisely the moment Axel had elected to steal a look at him, and he held Axel’s gaze for a steady one… Two… Three. Then the moment collapsed and the kitchen returned to chaos.

Axel had grown used to assuming the worst of those he worked with - an unspoken rule of the land - and it yet came as a surprise to him, when last night Riku smashed his lips into his own and simultaneously reached for Olette’s neck. Axel and Olette turned to poured cream under Riku’s touch. It had been a lascivious affair. There were lips everywhere; spit coated all of their bodies; Olette’s nipples slipped easily into their mouths, and Axel rubbed her clit with a practiced and constant rhythmic regularity; before she orgasmed, Riku moved Axel’s hand and ate her out until she came, her pussy fluid all over his face.

Axel inhales too sharply and coughs all over his hands. He’s really coughing a lot this time, and runs to the bathroom for a dash of water from the spigot and to finally fucking piss. His eyes are not bloodshot, to his surprise. The preemptive gatorade he had bought last night would go to waste, he realizes, when it dawns on him that he has no hangover. Weird. But he remembers how he promised  _ Riku  _ that he’d let him read a little bit of his… Writing. The real prick, Riku, rarely boasted about his breeding or educational background, but when he did, it kicked you right in the teeth. The day after he met that blonde guy Roxas, Axel bitched to Riku for one entire shift about his abhorrence for The Man, the verismilitude of institutions, of fakeness. And it wasn’t just a fucking Tuesday shift; Axel went into great detail about the comic loftiness of Upper East Siders and their fixation with the phrase  _ golden handcuffs,  _ as if each time they used it, their dicks would literally grow an inch, on a Friday night.

Riku, sensing a different kind of tension in him, cleared his throat. “You seem to like that blonde kid,” he said, slicing into mackerel.

Axel rolled his eyes at yet another order of  _ coq a vin.  _ “That’s all you got from what I said? Kid’s half the story. Not even. Jesus,” he grabbed for the sauvignon blanc.

“Well,” Riku started. He crinkled his brow. “You started chatting about this guy who almost got killed by a big ass van in front of Xi’an. And you keep mentioning he’s blonde, and now you’re bitching about rich people,” he smirked. “Again.”

“Okay, fine. Sure. Got me. Why do you give a fuck?”

“Because.” He looked at Axel mischievously. “You like the upper echelon shit. Can’t hide it from me,” he said.

Axel shook his head. “Nah man, not like that.”

“Oh, then what is it like? You think you’re fucking William C. Faulkner, reading in between your shitty job shifts, crafting the next big thing?”

“Well no, but I—”

“What? You a writer?”

“Kind of?”

“You write?”

“Sometimes, yeah.”

Riku took a long, hard look at Axel. He smiled. “Let me see it. Tuesday.”

Axel realized his mistake. He wanted to take it back. “It’s not like…  _ That, _ though. You know?”

“No, Axel. I  _ don’t  _ know.” Riku scoffed. He cut just the tip of his pointer finger and muttered a weak-sounding  _ fuck.  _

“Like I’m not… Gay,” he dropped his voice to a whisper, out of the earshot of other cooks. “It’s just work, you know?”

“And how does  _ writing  _ inform you sucking cock for cash? Afraid it’ll make you look like a — a girl? Like the fucking new guy?” Riku cut into the fish a bit too harshly. Axel frowned. He knew Riku was into guys. But he also hooked up with Olette on a semi-regular basis. But if it weren’t the money, Axel reasoned, he’d have given up on men a long, long time ago.

Two servers suddenly burst into the kitchen - Pence and Hayner - and they frantically ran to Chef Strife, tears nearly formed.

“Chef,” Hayner said, attempting to maintain a face of calm. But Cloud doesn’t hear him over his popping sauces. In the distance, they could hear the faint echoes of the dish guy, singing and likely already plastered. 

_ “Chef Strife,”  _ Hayner pleaded. The chef turned to him, his eyes glowering.

“Speak. Now.”

Hayner looked at Pence and Pence stared back. Cloud’s face reddened. He began to list what each wasted second was costing him: these sauces would fucking burn; there would be no hope for duck served opulently; and did Yuffie have that fucking risotto out yet? 

“... If another god damn moment of silence passes, then  _ both of you will lose your fucking—” _

“Leon’s here. At the bar. Olette’s talking with him.” Pence said. Yuffie gasped. Riku deadpanned. They all squirmed under Cloud’s murderous glare.

Cloud peered at Pence for just another moment, inspecting his face for any signs of treachery. Of mutiny. He made eye contact with Axel and Riku and Yuffie, ensuring that he had heard correctly. “Leon…?”

“Leon, Chef. Yes.”

“Get him the fuck out.”

“Chef, he won’t leave. He said if you didn’t come out, he’d, um… Come in?”

It careened into him all at once - the failure of his restaurant. He saw it all: the mouth-covered giggling among his wealthiest guests; at first, it would be relentless jeering at his inability to keep his personal life out of his professional; he’d be a fucking joke. His vendors, hearing about the debacle because it’s a small fucking world and word travels fast, would give him second-rate cuts at prices given to chains because if his ex can fuck him, then they could too. He paled. And this was one possible death of a five-star joint along Park Ave - reputational. Death by grumpy, curmudgeonly regulars whose perfectly-curated Friday nights had been tainted by a scorned lover, apparently the chef’s. Death by Yuppies’ nature to be given to narrative hyperbole.  _ Les Notes?  _ It used to be good. Used to be great - exquisite, even. But the chef can’t handle his shit, and his ex-husband broke all the dishes and threatened to throw up a slideshow featuring Chef Strife, drug addict, doing every bad thing he’d ever done in his life...

Leon needed to get the  _ fuck  _ out of his restaurant.

“You,” he pointed at Axel. “Bounce him. Now.”

Axel, shocked that Pence had the gall to even utter the Forbidden Name, froze. “Me?”

Cloud had no time for this. “Right,” he said after a moment. “Homophobe. Well, sometimes. Riku.” And before Cloud could instruct further, Riku disappeared from the kitchen.

That was Friday. And then Saturday, Axel fooled around with Olette and then possibly with Riku. Which brings us back to pensive, melancholy Sunday.

Axel is smoking his seventh cigarette of the morning. It’s cold out and the city is covered in a light mist and pale sunlight barely penetrates the clouds; he’s walking around his room now, unsure of where he placed his tattered notebook, and he can’t shake the feeling that Riku thinks he’s a homophobe, too; he turns the corner and catches his reflection in a full-length mirror, an ordinary reminder that it is him, and him alone, in this house. He can’t stop thinking about the whole Leon ordeal, and that Chef called him a homophobe. He wanted to argue with him, to shove his face into a mirror, and ask him, cheeks bloody from the falling shards, if a homophobe would really take it up the ass three times a week. Would a homophobe really spend his days thinking about some Columbia pissbaby because he has nice hair and a kind voice?

_ Riku.  _ He finds his notebook and plops down at his desk with mild abandon. Riku didn’t know shit, and he thought he could comment on the situation? Of him and the blonde guy? Fucking Riku and his pretentious education. He had a knack of slipping into cracks and twisting your guts from the insides. He could force you to realize things about yourself that you didn’t even know you didn’t know. Axel is disdainful. He’s considering tossing the book altogether, but knows that if he turns up empty-handed to Riku come Tuesday, that his week will be a living hell. It feels weird now to think of his name because of the whole blowjob thing. Riku certainly didn’t make Axel orgasm twice, and it certainly wasn’t the hottest thing Axel had seen all week - the image of Riku enveloping his dick, again and again, absolutely obscene, and Olette watching them both, jaw unhinged, licking her lips. She wanted more.

See, Axel  _ liked _ this part of the job. He liked the messy chiasmus: sex in food, and food in sex. To blur the boundaries of line cooking by introducing the material of human folly excited him; he often considered it his lifeline. At the restaurant, it was always the trinity of him, Riku, and Yuffie who brought the kitchen to life from its ashen, midnight slumber. He’d hook up his old iTouch to the speakers and blast cacophonic, loud, dancing music: their kitchen was insular, chaotic, kingly. Riku, reigning Fish Guy and thus the guy with the most precise knife handling, would cut them neat little lines on his dainty non-work cutting board. One by one, they’d really lean into it, snort three times, and usually mimic some shitty air guitar solo and sing the chorus at the top of their lungs. It was their fucking kitchen. And Chef Strife never saw this behind-the-scenes work. This off-putting labor.

And when Axel would head down to the Wilmer law offices on Friday nights, he’d be equally as charmed when his clients took him to dinner first. For the only time in his life, he was on the other side of the swinging doors. He knew most, if not all, of the cooks at the good restaurants - well, the ones that opted to serve _supper_ as opposed to _dinner,_ because supper went until 2 A.M. Axel was many things - a coward, a slut, cook, smoker, dealer - but he wasn’t stupid. On Friday nights, he worked until 11 P.M. sharp, and quickly bounced to the financial district to catch the overworked, depressed, stupidly rich men leaving their offices, and offered them a coy smile. A shoulder to lean on. A friend. (Who would fuck you. At a very high price.) It was always pathetic, in that excruciatingly mundane way, when they’d offer to order room service with cum still all over their chests and mouths. Axel always refused on principle, but he did like it - this messy chiasmus.

His head snaps from his notebook at the sound of his phone ringing. His heart skips a few beats when he sees it’s from a number he doesn’t recognize. 

“Hello?” 

“Hey. This is Axel, right?”

He feels his face pricking with heat. “Y-yeah, that’s right. Is this…?”

The voice brightens. “It’s Roxas! Sorry I—”

“I thought you weren’t gonna call,” Axel cuts him off, his breath coming in threads.

“... Sorry. I was saying, I had a pretty rough week, but I know that two weeks is, like, way too long to wait.” He fumbles a little bit, feeling awkward on the receiver. “But if you’re free sometime this week, I’d love to grab a coffee or something.”

Axel can hardly believe he’s alive. His entire body feels like it’s peeling away, and too many seconds pass before he realizes what Roxas just said. “Um,” he twirls his hair in his loose hand. Nervous. “Y-yeah, um, what about now? Does that work?”

“Now?” Roxas sounds surprised. “Hmm. I can do now, totally. Where do you wanna meet?”

Axel is running around his apartment. He’s looking for clean jeans, for a shirt that hasn’t been soiled with permanent armpit sweat stains. “I’ll meet you anywhere.”

Roxas smiles in a way that Axel can hear. “What about Mill Korean by the university?”

“Perfect.” He throws his atrociously dirty towel on the counter. “I’ll see you in an hour.” He hangs up and lets out a long, deep sigh, and then steps into the steaming shower.

* * *

Talking with Axel is bewildering, Roxas thinks. He decided to wear black jeans, leather boots, a slimming button-down and down-feather jacket. There was no point in rejecting the stereotype, Roxas thought, if it kept you both well-dressed and warm. Axel had thrown on his Levi’s, a black sweater, and his windbreaker. Brought a beanie just in case - the one with the Calcifer flame - and Roxas nearly doubled over when he saw Axel wearing it because oh my fucking god. 

They recount the moment Roxas was almost taken out by the van in front of Xian’s Famous Foods - a remarkable Chinese food place - while slurping up their steaming bowls of bibimbap. Roxas ordered a cold brew coffee and dumped about a quart of cream into it. Axel opted for green tea.

“I seriously thought you were gonna die for a second, I shit you not,” Axel confesses, laughing. 

“Me and you both!” Roxas throws his hands up. “Yeah, glad it didn’t happen. Oh, but I never thanked you for making sure I was okay. And for giving me some of your food. So,” he smiles brightly at Axel, “thank you.”

Axel looks up from his salty, boiled egg and stares at Roxas with such intensity that he feels reality receded. “N-no problem, Roxas.”

“You haven’t been out with someone for a while, huh?”

“What? What would make you say that?”

“Well, for one, your face is as red as a beet. And you’re stuttering, and I didn’t take you for a stuttering type…”

“Um, well, it’s not that, necessarily.”

“It’s okay,” Roxas sips his cold brew, his eyes sparkling. “I’ve been out on enough Tinder dates for the both of us. But I have to say, I really sort of… Like you.”

Roxas reaches across the table, hand nearly touching Axel’s. He doesn’t want to freak him out. But Axel is exploding inside. He’s clenching his jaw and feels fucking  _ butterflies _ rise up from his stomach, and he closes the distance between their hands, shuddering at the warmth of Roxas’s palm. What soft skin. An easy gesture.

“Yeah. I… I like you too.”

* * *

Axel  _ loved _ blood in his kitchen and in his food, and he was nearly certain that Roxas would never be able to  _ like _ him anyway, not fully; to love Axel was like loving a black hole, and he didn’t want to do that to Roxas, the blonde kid who’s just some fucking student at Columbia that doesn’t know better than to fuck with a washed-up line cook and professional whore. To make Roxas come would be cheating, Axel rationalized to himself as he turned for the eighth time in his lumpy mattress. Cheating on himself, because he wasn’t even sure how much he liked guys, and Roxas likely stuck out to him because he was just so god damn pretty. Because he looked like a… A girl. What are these monsters, though, that eat away at your psyche, crunch your bones, and refuse to spit you out whole and transformed? They’re the ones that lurk at the edge of your bed, looming and imperious, feeding off your self-hatred and growing with every minute you turn away. No way Roxas could stomach Axel beyond ramen dates and walks in the park; rightly so, with his tainted dick and abused body, with his calloused cook hands that read like a map, the injuries. 

He can’t sleep. (He can never sleep.) But tonight he can’t think, either. It’s the first Friday he worked a full restaurant shift without dipping out to the financial district after. He shot back well whiskey with Riku and Olette, looked at them with hazy, bloodshot eyes, and decided right there that he wanted Roxas more than he’d ever wanted anything in his life. But he was an Ivy League prick who had a white-hot future, beating with wealth and success and gold watches, and it certainly wouldn’t contain some loser, second-rate cook with razor burn. With hands that could sand the floor of a gym. Nah, he wouldn’t want that, and he shouldn’t want that. Axel throws down a ten, says his goodbyes to Riku and Olette, meekly waves to the bartender, Luxord, and slinks back home. Thinking. Wishing.


End file.
